Site Mobile Navigation

Testing My Twins

TWO years ago, when our daughters were in the fourth grade, they got the same score on New York’s English Language Arts test, identical not only in the final tally, but also on each subsection of the test. Last year, they nearly did it again, with E.L.A. scores only a few points apart. This is just the sort of story that makes parents of identical twins a hit at back-to-school potlucks.

But there was one thing about the twins’ latest scores that was even more striking than their similarity: they were approximately 40 points lower than their fourth grade results.

My husband and I could have seen the lower scores as a disturbing sign of the decline of our daughters’ teachers, school or academic development, but instead we saw them largely as an amusing instance of identical twin weirdness. It was difficult to find any other explanation. They could have been the result of less competent teachers, except that both girls “looped” — meaning each had the same teacher in fourth and fifth grade. It could have been the peer groups, but they didn’t change either.

Or it could have been us — perhaps the girls’ interest in reading and writing had diminished, or maybe my husband and I had been less demanding of them. But our household rules about reading have been consistent for years and address not how much the girls need to read, but where and when they are forbidden to do so: while walking across busy intersections, in the car (they get sick) and, most contentiously, in the bathroom.

The no-reading-in-the-bathroom rule is vigorously enforced by the twins’ teenage sister, who routinely pounds on the door yelling, “I know what you’re doing in there!” We all know, since they stash their comic books and copies of “Peter Pan” and “Sounder” behind the wastepaper basket.

Photo

Credit
Lauren Nassef

Thankfully, we could treat the girls’ decline lightly. They are good students, their lower score was still very respectable, and they had already gotten into middle school.

But we still had to face the scores. I hated to think that either of my daughters’ teachers felt that the girls had failed to grow intellectually, that something had been stilled in them, or worse, that their teachers would be penalized for the results. And it would be terribly demoralizing for the girls to be told that their scores had declined after all their hard work. How could they not have learned anything all year?

In fact, it seems very clear to me that they did learn. I watched the girls read dozens of books that year and heard them discuss the books, unprompted, in subtle ways, with attention to each author’s style and to the importance of tone and setting. The summer before the E.L.A. exam, they read “The Outsiders,” by S. E. Hinton, and enjoyed the novel’s grim realism. They read “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” and kept telling me that I shouldn’t discard wilted lettuce and bruised fruit because Anne’s family would have eaten it gladly. They read books they would not have had the maturity or stamina to read the summer before, when such dark realities would have been untouchable.

The test simply failed to capture that progress. I do believe that multiple choice exams are a good measurement of student competence. My daughters read and write well, and this is demonstrated by their relatively high test scores. But the tests cannot demonstrate yearly progress. There is simply too much “noise” in the data, especially for higher performing students, who are essentially working year after year at their full capacity. Personality, home environment, relatively benign gaps in world knowledge — even genetic predispositions — seem to all play a part in test results.

I don’t know which questions the girls missed. I suspect there may have been an exam passage on soccer or cowboys, some topic of witheringly slight interest to them. Whatever the reason for the decline, I am certain it has nothing to do with the girls’ overall reading ability, or the competence of their teachers.

As a parent and a teacher, I feel strongly that teachers need guidance. We need to always be striving. We need to be energized by thoughtful analysis of our successes and failures. But we need to devise a way of measuring teacher-effectiveness that provides teachers with meaningful data — and yearly progress on state exams just isn’t it. Teachers’ unions are right to resist any increase in the weight of this unreliable measure. I’m not sure what the solution is, but if twin studies are the gold standard for sciences like behavioral genetics, perhaps they could help in education reform as well. This is our family’s small contribution.

Although a number of parents have asked me what I am going to do to ensure the girls do not lose ground in E.L.A. this year, we have not made any changes to our home reading routine. However, my husband and I are reconsidering the bathroom ban on reading, not so much because of the scores but because, as with so many well-intentioned rules, the enforcement is harder to live with than the crime.